Digital Texbooks in Florida Schools by 2015

Watch: Clearwater High School - The Cost of Going Digital

      Florida’s legislation on digital textbooks in all public schools by 2015 is significant in that it would be one of the first of its kind in the country. Presently, only two other states in the U.S. have a similar law in their books. One of those states being California, where legislation encourages, yet does not mandate, digital textbooks in public schools by 2020. Another example is the state of Illinois where legislation was passed in 2010 expanding the definition of textbooks to include digital and electronic formats and/or eReaders. Florida’s law remains by far the most ambitious of all measures proposed at the state level, requiring full implementation of digital textbooks by 2015.

      However, this measure presents a number of challenges for state Dept. of Education (DOE) administrators and local school districts given its ambitious timeline and scope. One of the major challenges being the recent decrease in funding for public K-12 education in Florida, largely a result of decreasing property values/tax collections, and the sun-setting of federal stimulus dollars allocated to the state over the past two years.

      The law also presents a challenge in terms of scope, as it may be generally easy to implement in one school as a pilot (like the one featured in this video) but may be a much more complex issue implementing it at a district-wide level in a school district like Miami-Dade County (the largest in the state and fourth largest in the nation). In a district like Miami-Dade, coming up with over 320,000 eReaders may prove to be quite a logistical and financial challenge. That’s without even taking into account a whole other host of issues in terms of bandwidth capabilities, staff training, IT support, etc.

      Ultimately, the interesting part of this legislation is that the language per se does not require eReaders, it requires “digital” or “electronic” instructional materials. Therefore, one could potentially argue that this is really an issue of making textbooks available on the web, or in PDF format, and not necessarily providing a device (i.e. eReader) to each student. The issue with this then becomes one of equity and access (every child does not have a computer at home); an issue which school districts could only solve by providing each student with an eReader, just as they would be provided with a textbook.